visualSilicon.com

Gary V. is the most inspiring of all entrepreneur/speakers I have come across - for me, at this time and in my situation. He helped me find a plain simple answer to the most challenging question of all time that I think every entrepreneur must lose sleep over until he/she finds the answer. I did lose sleep over it, for years, until I heard Gary V. spell it out.

The question? "How do you find customers?".

Bear with me as I give you a summary of his answer and an amazing example!

I may have had many ideas over the past decade or so for making a new business and generating a revenue, I may have tried to turn some of them into actual businesses (with little or no profit in the end) and with each attempt I tried to take one new advice (from a financially accomplished friend or role model) and tried to make that single advice the differentiating factor between each new attempt and the one before. However, none have come close to Gary's advice that I am about to reveal to you.

For example, a successful friend of mine once said "First, Find Your First Customer" and I took this advice to heart and put it beyond everything and anything else when I was trying to sell a software product that I was building a couple of years ago to sell to developers. I ended up paying around US $5000 to find that first customer. The results? I did find them and it did feel great. Of course, if you focus your attention on something that much it will pay off. Why I put that project to the side [for the time being] is beyond this post.

This time, it will be Gary's answer to the question "How do you find customers?". This, my friends, is the real question I have been seeking to answer during all these years of trying, reading, studying, watching, following, listening and learning. And let me tell you, no one, and I mean, no one, had ever been able to answer it as clearly and as precisely as Gary does. And, this, is why I will be taking his answer as the one and only advice I will be putting at the top of all my priorities for the rest of my entrepreneurial life.

I suggest you read/listen to his book but here is a quick summary:
1- Create and publish free content online (1% of the effort)
2- Get involved with, become part of and help virtually "every single" related community on the Internet; do not try to sell your content to them though, just let them find it (99% of the effort)
3- Care and Repeat (the other 100% of what you need to do!)

That... is... it. The answer is that simple.

Let's now take a look at an example that I found after Gary's answer opened my eyes so much:

Have you heard of or watched the film "District 9"? Out of South Africa, the very well accomplished director Neill Blomkamp made this international success, not just for himself but for the whole nation of South Africa. I am not from there, but hell I am proud of what he accomplished. He is my hero because he proved you don't have to be one of the Hollywood elite to do it! His company, Oats Studio, has built an online following of nearly 842K on YouTube (at the time of this writing) by publishing short films and videos on YouTube for free, films that cost a lot of money to make. Keep this number in mind and read the second part of the "Example" story. You are going to love this.

Now, have you ever heard of a guy nick named "3 kliks philip" !? Well, neither had I until about a week ago. I came across his YouTube channel and videos when I was randomly Googling for "How to build a new Half-Life Map" (yes, I am a fan of the game, and I have even spent a few years as a programmer in games companies in the UK which means I, of all people, should have heard of "3kliksphilip", but no I hadn't). Why am I mentioning him? Well, guess how many followers he has on YouTube. 886K. Yes, you read it right, 886K (at the time of this writing) which is 44K more, that is 44'000 followers more than Neill Blomkamp's Oats Studio! All by himself, all because of making and publishing free content repeatedly - content that doesn't cost anywhere near what making real short films cost!

If you think having 886 thousand followers does not translate to real money and real financial freedom then please rethink your understanding of "business", "marketing" and "customer". In Gary V's words get there and it will happen, more so than you can dream.

So that's it everyone. Now I know I have no one to blame but myself for all my past failures. Thanks to Gary, I know had I stuck with any one of my past attempts at making a real business with this one advice, this one strategy in mind, I would have had real success; at least a much bigger success than I have had so far.

And if you are still reading and wondering: Yes, I have already started reshaping everything and gearing everything in my professional life with and for this strategy. If "3kliksphilip" did it, so can we all :)

My good friend Ben (he is a big time seller on Udemy) says "First Find Your First Customer".

So I thought hard, searched and found a few (actually many) good marketing channels where I can find potential buyers.

Of course the first port of call was my own closest network. Unlike my older ideas which would get an "I am not sure" reaction from many people, this time I got "oh interesting, look here or there" kind of reactions. This was a positive :)

So I moved on to a slightly wider circle. A few companies that I knew from my past works and I could contact; and then some others that I did not know much but which I suspected wanting this service.

This job of finding the first customer is really really hard. This is going from ZERO TO ONE (as Peter Thiel says) and it is really hard.

But here are the results so far: 43 companies or persons contacted and one person replied saying "Acknowledged, I have forward to the right persons in the company". I look at these numbers as follows:

Emailing companies or persons in this way is like a "slightly-targeted" advertising campaign on platforms like LinkedIn or GoogleAds. So far, about 50 impressions of my Ad (well, 43 to be accurate) resulted in one single click. Anyone who has done Ads would tell you that if you turn 1% of your clicks into a sale then you have a business. By those measures, I need at least another 100 acknowledged (emails such as the aforementioned response I got) to go before I know whether I am in business or not.

Besides, I think those 1/100 kind of statistics apply to one-time-buy products or services. To give your customer support and bug fixing (which would need exposing your source code to a 3rd party) would need a lot more deliberation than a click. So I am gonna set a different goal for myself.

If I get 100 acknowledgements (which at the observed rate would mean at least another 450 cold emails) and if I get 1 "request for further information" from a "curious potential buyer" then I would say I am in business. That one call would equate someone wanting to open their wallet for the service I have to offer - regardless of what the outcome will be, this would mean business - one that may need an expert in sales! :)

After years of software development, customer support, bug fixing and what not for others, and helping a few people become millionaires, I had to do some serious self reflection and sole searching (In my opinion learning about yourself (or looking yourself in the mirror metaphorically) is the most important and the first step every wanna-be founder must take.

But to do this without any external help I needed to find the right questions to ask. So I started meeting and learning from financially successful people, attending networking events, reading books, blogs and articles and listening to podcasts and audio books about start-ups or successful business founders. Thousands of hours of it over a few years. Gradually, I got the confidence to try stuff.

The first suggestion I stuck with was "Just Start Running, You Will Find Your Way Around". This resulted in Mosaic3DX back in 2013: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mosaic3dx/ and much later in https://www.udemy.com/starting-up/

But the good "sole-searching" questions came after these failed or not-so-successful projects later:

1. Find out what is your "WHY" - I learnt that from Simon Sinek (so thanks Simon)

2. Identify your best skill that (A) you can sell for a profit, (B) and which you can scale such that the business does not need yourself being present on client premises all the time (or at all) - This was my own making, never heard it from anyone

And it was right in front of me all that time: I had been really good at keeping my past employers and my clients (since I started self-employment) happy by solving their customers issues (which usually included tracking down and fixing bugs in the software code) and I had been really good at doing it without hassling my clients - a single email/call either directly from my clients or from their customers and I would be on it like a hawk no matter what was needed (Travel to remote part of the world? No problem. Stay up all night? No problem. Hire and manage someone else to do it because I had no clue myself? No problem.). I just git the job done.

So why not turn this into a formal service entirely on its own?
After all others have done it for other services and sold to small and big companies. Why not me!?

So here I am, visualSilicon.com is selling exactly that.